


How to Disappear Completely

by nolaespoir



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, M/M, Post Reichenbach, Reunion, Wedding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-01
Updated: 2013-04-22
Packaged: 2017-12-07 03:15:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/743551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nolaespoir/pseuds/nolaespoir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One cannot expect to pretend to die and be allowed to live afterwards.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Many many forever thanks to Abby Kate, who picked at this for me. Because basically she's amazing.

One day Sherlock Holmes had been dead longer than he had been alive.

 

For John Watson, that is.

 

It was November and it was as cold and dreary as one would imagine a late autumn day in London to be, when suddenly, without anyone really noticing, it had been one year, four months, and twenty days since Sherlock Holmes had jumped from atop St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. And just like that, with the passing of a day, the world’s only consulting detective had been dead for longer than John Watson, formerly of the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers, had ever known him alive.

 

John Watson didn’t think of this as an especially poignant day because he was a solider and he knew enough of suffering and enough of grieving to not mark days off on a calendar. He was of a tougher sort, a man who had lost the ones he’d loved to illness, to violence, and to time.

 

He knew that mourning didn’t abide by markers and milestones, that one would not naturally and automatically feel different once one reached that very certain day—1 Week After, 1 Month After, 1 Year After—that one had been clinging to and relying on so desperately.

 

Grief was something that visited you and left you of its own accord; it could not be wrangled and scheduled into one’s diary. When grief came to call, all you could do was make it comfortable during its stay—invite it in, spend rainy afternoons with it curled up on the couch with a mug of tea, take it into your bed at night and cry yourself to sleep on its shoulder, let it touch you in all the ways you know to be touched. That is what one does with grief.

 

Because one day that grief will move on. One day grief will leave you behind, too, and all you’ll have is the quiet but persistent feeling that you somehow didn’t mourn right or long enough; the feeling that you’ve been brought through something dark and necessary, and without your permission, you’ve been changed by it.

 

That’s all grief does, really. Quietly changes you. Until there is no going back.

 

Eventually, without quite noticing it, you’ll go longer and longer without remembering your grief. Years will go by. Three years will go by. You’ll have bad days of course, days when you do remember, and you’ll be struck ill by the guilt for having forgot, but then that guilt will leave you, too, and there will just be this:

 

John Watson, MD, moving about in the world as if Sherlock Holmes had never existed. As if Sherlock Holmes was ever only a dusty photograph propped up against a skull on a too-small mantel, as if he was just a story, just a character spun to life in a tiny little blog written by a tiny little man with a broken-up little mind.

 

This is how John Watson moved on from Sherlock Holmes: slowly, slowly, and then all at once.

 

Mary Morstan helps.

 

\---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ----------

 

John had had a lot to drink that night. He didn’t know who exactly was responsible—who he should thank or blame, depending on how he felt in the morning—but someone had been very diligent about keeping his glass full. And just now he saw no reason to rail against the looseness of his limbs.

 

Tomorrow he’d be a married man.

 

The rehearsal dinner was quaint, with the whole party tucked away in the back of a small Italian place in the city. It wasn’t _posh_ , but it was nice, and that suited John and Mary just fine. The staff had pushed a handful of tables together and there was more than enough wine to go around, so it suited John and Mary’s friends just fine, too. There were old rugby mates of John’s and some women Mary taught with in Camden. A childhood friend had accompanied Harriet, who had behaved rather splendidly, to the party; and Mary’s two older brothers sat close enough to John to keep a playful eye on him. Her parents sat at the far side of the table, quiet in their own way but dreadfully fond of John, and scattered here and there were the other adoring faces the couple had managed to endear themselves to over the years. Friends, colleagues, family. They were all there.

 

Except one.

 

John had thought about leaving an empty seat, even. But he didn’t, in the end.

 

The truth was, John tried not to think of Sherlock much these days, especially when he’d had a few drinks in him. He’d become rather good at it, too, the not thinking of him. He’d managed it throughout nearly the whole of his courtship with Mary. He’d told her about him, of course, of all their adventures, of all the madness that had at one point been his life—but he managed to do it wistfully. It no longer hurt him to talk about or even think about Sherlock Holmes, and once it stopped hurting, it hardly seemed worth talking or thinking about him at all.

 

So he hadn’t, not properly, not for a very long time.

 

But then John had proposed and Mary had said yes and the ghost of Sherlock Holmes seemed suddenly very keen on making itself known. John had thought about Sherlock a good deal over the last few months, in the midst of picking out floral arrangements and cake flavors. Wedding planning was the sort of predictable, mundane thing John would have assumed Sherlock would’ve hated, except… part of him couldn’t help but wonder from time to time if Sherlock wouldn’t have also been a bit intrigued at the chaos of it all. It wasn’t serial murders or an international smuggling ring, but seating arrangements had turned out to be no laughing matter.

 

Sometimes he could hear Sherlock in his head as he was pouring over them late at night, Mary having dozed off hours before. John didn’t sleep too well—some things don’t change—and he found a mug of tea and a few soggy biscuits to be just the thing.

 

_“Oh, don’t put Mary’s uncle beside her brother’s wife—Mr. Cole has had a thing for Mrs. Morstan since before the wedding. She slept with him, don’t you know? Haven’t you noticed the handkerchief she always carries around in her purse?”_

_“No no no, you shouldn’t put Ryan there. Sit him with Mary’s friend, Louise—she’s always had an army kink.”_

_“Do I really have to tell you why it’s such a retched idea to have Harry at the same table with Mary’s cousin? Addictive personalities, John.”_

 

And so on. The deductions ran like a track in John’s head and they turned a simple seating chart into a regular Sudoku puzzle. And once they started, John couldn’t quite shut them off. And frankly, he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to.

 

John Watson was okay. He was okay without Sherlock Holmes. But damn if he didn’t miss his best friend.

 

“John?” Mary’s hand touched him gently on the arm, rousing him from the memory. “Are you okay?”

 

“Of course,” he said, because he was. He really was. He leaned over and pressed his wine-stained lips to Mary’s and they burst into giggles half way through the kiss.

 

“I cannot wait to marry you tomorrow,” John murmured into her skin, kissing a line from her lips, along her jaw, up towards her ear, burying his nose in the swirling mat of her dark auburn locks.

 

“Me too, John. Me too,” Mary said, running her perfectly varnished nails over his check and down his neck. They smiled ridiculous, painful smiles into each other’s skin. John thought Mary Mary Mary. He didn’t think about Sherlock Holmes at all.

 

Dinner lasted late into the night; it was nearly the morning of their wedding before the bill was settled and everyone drifted out into the warm June night, black as black, city lights barring the stars from the sky. Those who were well enough composed wished the couple well with kisses on both cheeks, promising to see them later at the church. Those who were not so well composed devolved into hooting and hollering, demanding signs of affection John and Mary were only too happy to give. But there was a wedding to be had the next day—this day—and soon everyone was bided each other adieu.

 

There was a black car waiting outside at the curb as the party exited the restaurant. No one else noticed as they slowly spilled away, but John did, and his stomach sank at the sight of it.

 

John hadn’t spoken to Mycroft Holmes in three years, had all but forgotten of the elder Holmes’ continued existence—yet here he was, stretching his stupidly long legs out of the back of a sleek black town car, followed by his now strikingly emaciated body. This was nothing like the man John had shrugged off in a graveyard all those years ago. Then again, John supposed he wasn’t much like the man who had done the shrugging.

 

“John,” Mycroft said, his voice still as measured and cool as Dr. John Watson, formerly of 221B Baker Street, remembered it. John, who had been stumbling slightly and grasping onto Mary for support, stood suddenly still. He eyed the sleekly dressed shell of a man in front of him.

 

“What are you doing here?” The gaiety a moment earlier was gone from his voice.

 

“John,” Mary scolded, having no idea who Mycroft was or why her fiancé had suddenly seized up in her arms.

 

“It is, as I understand it, tradition for the bride and groom to spend the night apart before their special day. I mere thought I might offer my services, in that regard,” he answered without missing a beat. His face may have been sallow and his bones jangling in his suit, but John thought nothing much else had changed about Mycroft Holmes.

 

“I’m staying at Mike’s tonight,” John answered stubbornly.

 

“I’ve already had someone put Mike in a cab home. He wasn’t quite in a fit state to be entertaining visitors, you see,” Mycroft shot back. John stared at him, not so unlike the stone-faced soldier who’d done so many times before, a lifetime ago.

 

“Who he is?” Mary whispered into John’s ear when his arms clinched around her just a hair tighter.

 

“Please excuse my manners, Ms. Morstan. Mycroft Holmes,” he answered for himself. He did not extent a hand nor make to kiss Mary in greeting, but he gave a nod of his head and a twirl of his umbrella and seemed to believe this sufficient. John thought Mycroft’s eyes lingered on Mary a moment too long, flashed up and down her person like Sherlock’s always had, deducing. Mycroft scowled and glanced at John, his face mingled with confusion and sadness for the briefest of flashes, before he steeled himself once more.

 

“Sherlock’s brother?” she asked, her question still directed at John. He had moved to stand between the elder homes and his fiancée, as if it wasn’t already too late to shield Mary from Mycroft’s deductions.

 

“The one and only.” John let out a sigh. He suddenly felt sickeningly sober.

 

“Please, John,” Mycroft said with the faintest hint of a sneer the man was capable of producing. “Consider it a sort of… wedding present. A final act of appeasement.”

 

“There’s nothing to appease, Mycroft. You killed your brother. My best friend. I will never forgive you. The guilt is yours to live with.”

 

The street grew quiet around them. Mary shifted uncomfortably and her fingers, which had been clutching John close to her in a protective gesture, loosened. She had never heard that tone from John before, like ice cutting through the warm, heavy air, and it caused her to recoil for a moment. John was a fine, decent guy. Her John was. She knew this. But this John seemed more the Soldier than the Doctor and she wasn’t certain she knew that John at all.

 

“Get in, John.” Mycroft’s tone was stern again as his face distorted into something ugly, familiar. There would be no pleasantries anymore. The gloves had come off.

 

“Screw you.”

 

“The guilt you speak of with such confidence, Dr. Watson. It is not mine alone, of course. I really must insist you get in.” John stared at his, his eyes wide, his jaw slack.

 

“Are you suggesting that I—“ John started, livid. It had been years. He’d gone through three therapists and had sworn up and down to them all that Sherlock’s death—

 

“Oh yes, Dr. Watson. I’m not sure if it’s just your therapists you’ve been lying to or if it’s to yourself, as well. But I am here to assure you that my brother’s death was no more my fault than it was yours.”

 

“You—“ John went to punctuate the profanity he hadn’t voiced with a punch to the face, but Mary caught his arm, her eyes darting between the two men, confused.

                                                                                                                              

“John?” Her voice small and kind, as if Mary’s voice could be anything but. But there was a hint of something else, an aftertaste of fear or shock or something else entirely that neither could name.

 

John gave a great sigh, counted to ten with his eyes shut, and let his body go slack against hers.

 

“Maybe you should just go with him. He clearly has something to say to you,” Mary said quietly against the shell of his ear.

 

There was a faint mist in the air, a lingering summer’s day’s humidity, and Mary’s hair was curling some at the ends. The faint wisps around her face were twisting into ringlets, and her face glowed under the streetlights, giving John the impression of something altogether too innocent for this world—one more thing being entrusted to him for safe keeping. The thought of failing again struck fear into his heart.

 

“Yes, alright, fine. Just this once. Just this one last time. All of that—Sherlock—that was a lifetime ago. Just this one last time.”

 

“Certainly, John. I will inconvenience you no further than tonight.”

 

John wrapped Mary up tightly in his arms and brought their lips together slowly, kissing her like she deserved to be kissed by the man she loved and who loved her, on their wedding day. When he pulled away he noted the flicker of dread in her eyes, before she gave a small nod and shoved him in the direction of the car. She knew this was something he needed, whether or not he did. She understood it to be the closing of a final door on some very important chapter that Mary had spent two years merely guessing at.

 

“I’ll see you tomorrow… tonight,” John murmured, finally letting her go.

 

“Yes, I’ll be the one in white and all of that,” Mary said with a gentle laugh and an affectionate roll of her eyes. Mycroft had waved a cab down in the interim and was holding the door open for her. She slipped inside with a hesitant ‘Thanks’ and a final kiss blown over her shoulder towards John. He smiled forcefully and waved her off.

 

“I honestly can’t even begin to think what this is about,” John mumbled, sorting his alcohol-loose limbs enough to be able to climb into the back seat of Mycroft’s car.

 

“No, I don’t imagine you can,” he said pointedly, sliding in after him.

 

\---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ----------

 

“I don’t think about Sherlock anymore, you know. It’s been years,” John said. He was the first to speak, the cool silence hovering in the space between him and Mycroft finally getting to him.

 

Consciously or not, John had immediately curled in on himself after climbing into the car. He had intended to sit tall, or barring that, slouch with a discernable air of nonchalance—but neither had quite happened. Instead he had pressed himself tight against the far door, with his knees drawn up like a little boy, his arms wrapped around them while he leaned his head against the cool, tinted window, watching the darkened streets of London passing by. He wanted to put as much space as possible between him and this Holmes who was wrong, all wrong.

 

Mycroft, for his part, looked just as prim and proper as he did in all of John’s memories of him. Even the worst memories, those very worst moments of betrayal and accusations and blame, in which Mycroft had barely stirred. Memories from another life. Like John, Mycroft sat rather close to his own door, but somehow he did not look nearly so much like a trapped animal. Their bodies were leaning away from each other, leaving a sort of gaping chasm between them.

 

Mycroft hardly batted an eye when John finally spoke. He was, however, fiddling considerable with the handle of his umbrella, which was stuck between his crossed legs and the car door.

 

“Quite right. Why should you have? He was only your friend.”

 

John wanted to glare at him for the comment but found he didn’t have the strength. He had strength for very little in regards to the Holmeses these days.

 

It hadn’t been easy. Of course it hadn’t been _easy_. How could anyone suggest otherwise? John had watched his friend—his closest friend—plummet from a building right before his eyes and he hadn’t been able to do _anything_. Not a damn thing.

 

_Oh, God, no._

 

But John was a doctor.

 

Doctors knew sometimes there just wasn’t anything to be done.

 

And kneeling on the pavement, his jeans soaked through with the halo of blood splintering out from Sherlock’s body through cracks no one could stop up, John had said his peace.

 

Sherlock was not the first man John had seen die. Sherlock wasn’t the first friend he had seen die. He was a doctor. He was a soldier. John’s own life story could be told through all the lives he hadn’t been able to save.

 

When he was a young boy his aunt had died a slow and painful death from ovarian cancer. He was only nine but his mother had insisted they stay in her hospital room as her breathing slowed down… as the beeping on her heart monitor slowed down… She flat-lined at 7 o’clock in the morning on Boxing Day, and John had stood fidgeting in the corner as she did. He didn’t know to cry. He watched his mother wiping none-too-discreetly at her eyes, glassy as if she’d been drinking; and he saw his uncle crumble to his knees beside the hospital bed, wailing, his open mouth pressed against the back of his aunt’s limp hand.

 

John learned at nine-years-old that pain is not just a feeling you get when you fall down and scrap your knee. Pain is a sound, too. A piercing scream that shakes the bones of everyone around you. John felt it go through him, rippling through his body, under his skin. It made him squirm, made him aware of all his fingers and toes that were still very much alive, very much not in pain.

 

His mother had frowned at him when she noticed he wasn’t crying.

 

“Your aunt is dead,” she said sternly, shaking his shoulders a little bit. She pointed to the body slumped in the hospital bed. “She’s dead, John. Doesn’t that make you sad?” But somehow watching his aunt die, watching his uncle screaming in agony, hadn’t made him sad. In an odd way it had made John feel happy, relieved, because neither thing was happening to him. This was unacceptable to his mother and she shook him until one of the nurses stopped her with the pretense of needing to “have a word” out in the hall regarding her sister’s last rites. The nurse had given John a sad, understanding smile on her way out.

 

He watched the doctors and nurses flitting in and out of the room for the next hour, all sporting the same practiced looks of concern on their faces, and in that moment John wanted nothing more than to be them. Because for whatever reason, it was acceptable for them to not cry when people died.

 

His uncle killed himself a week later. Put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger with his toe. His mother explained that the pain of watching his wife die had simply been too much. The grief had overwhelmed him. John didn’t ever want to feel so much for someone else that it killed him.

 

This is why he had made a perfect soldier, and an even more perfect doctor.

 

John had looked at Sherlock and felt his own heart being ripped from his chest. Dr. Watson had glanced at Sherlock and in a second had noted extensive lacerations of the scalp and soft tissue of the face, cranial contusions and massive fracturing of the skull resulting in slight evacuation of the brain with subdural hemorrhaging. Sherlock’s internal organ has most likely also been crushed by the sudden deceleration of his body upon impact. Sherlock had died instantly.

 

Captain Watson would move on. Grieve quietly and move on. If he had it in him to be devastated by such thing, he never would have survived Afghanistan. Detach. Float it away like a balloon. There is always a limit to how much good can be done. He knew about cutting his losses.

 

So John had stitched his heart back into his chest and stood up, stepped back, and watched Sherlock’s lifeless body disappear around the corner.

 

“Why are you doing this?” John asked, drawing his eyes away from the car window. He’d been watching black cabbies zipping past, shuttling home all sorts of faceless souls, some with hearts more broken than his and some less. And yet they were all carrying on together despite their patchwork organs.

 

The last time John had seen Mycroft had been at Sherlock’s funeral, a quiet affair during which a handful of people who had barely known Sherlock stood around swapping stories while those who knew him best stood off to the side, unable to say anything at all. John had attended with Mrs. Hudson and had spent a painful hour glaring at Mycroft from across the room, before disappearing without so much as a “My condolences.”

 

Mycroft was silent.

 

“Sherlock was my friend. My best friend. You know that. But I’m not holding onto that part of my life anymore. I couldn’t. I’ve moved on,” John said, gentler than he expected. Three years was a long time. In the backseat of an almost familiar car, John suddenly couldn’t even muster up the energy to snap at Mycroft anymore.

 

Out of the corner of his eye, John noticed Mycroft give him a sharp look, his eyebrows furrowed—John thought it resembled fear or betrayed a capacity for anxiety John couldn’t picture Mycroft having, but the car was dark and after a moment he couldn’t be sure the look meant anything at all.

 

“You don’t miss him then?” Mycroft said after a long pause.

 

“I don’t know.”

 

“It’s a pretty straightforward question, Dr. Watson.”

 

“If anyone could understand just how not straightforward that question is, I would have thought it’d be you.”

 

“I love my brother,” Mycroft said vehemently, as if finally catching up to John’s earlier accusation of blame.

“I never said you didn’t, Mycroft. I loved him too, you know.” John could feel Mycroft staring, though he’d gone back to looking out the window himself, his throat suddenly constricting in a painfully familiar way.

 

John didn’t want this, not here, not now. He didn’t need Sherlock’s ghost haunting him this night, his one last night of being alone. He had lived with that ghost for much too long, longer than anyone gave him credit for. It had been a shadow, that specter, keeping him trapped in a cold and empty flat. It cut him off from friends, from those who wanted to help. It begged to be cared for, it demanded his attention, and he’d almost drowned under the weight of it.

 

John had spent two months hauled up in Baker Street after Sherlock’s funeral and Mycroft was the only one who knew that, besides Mrs. Hudson, who couldn’t bring herself to ascend those 17 steps even once after Sherlock died.

 

Two months.

 

For two months John had sat barefoot in his chair, staring into the empty one across from him, willing it to be anything but that: empty. He drank hot tea and then two hours later would drink cold tea; he couldn’t stop making two cups each time. He sifted through Sherlock’s papers when he could be bothered to do anything and he slept in Sherlock’s bed, on top of Sherlock’s duvet, when he could be bothered to sleep. He lost his mobile and wouldn’t have answered calls even if he could. He didn’t cry, didn’t pound his fists against the bullet-pierced walls, and most certainly didn’t reduce all of Sherlock’s lab equipment to glass shards on the kitchen floor…

 

But day after day he sat in that chair, across from that other chair, and let the shadow descend, let those ghostly arms wrap around him in a noose-like embrace.

 

Eventually Mrs. Hudson sent him an eviction notice. Failure to pay rent in a timely manner, it said. He knew she was doing it for his own good, ripping him from the dying womb that was 221B. If he was ever going to have a chance at life, he knew he had to leave—and inexplicably, he did want a chance at life. He didn’t want to be holding onto the indecipherable notes Sherlock had scribbled into a notebook, wondering if they were somehow another a suicide note, a better one, a better goodbye than that terrible one he’d been forced to listen to two months earlier. He didn’t want to wake up thinking Sherlock had come home because he could still smell him on the bed pillows, in his wardrobe, in the bathroom, if he opened that one half-empty bottle of aftershave. He needed more. He needed fewer endings. So he packed a single bag that very same day and disappeared, leaving everything that was once Sherlock Holmes to collect dust, to rot, to be forgotten.

 

John started a new life on the other side of the city, with a new therapist and a new surgery and eventually a few person with curly dark locks to wake up for each morning.

 

“Just tell me that you miss him. Please,” said Mycroft, his voice edging towards pleading—it was quiet but insistent and so unlike anything John had ever heard come out of the elder Holmes’ mouth. John peeled his eyes away from the window and looked across the seat, locking eyes with the man who had been so untouchable once upon a time. Mycroft Holmes did not look like that now. His eyes were wide and red, searching. John might have even said they seemed to contain a sad hopefulness about them, which worried him more than anything else.

 

“I missed him, Mycroft. I _missed_ him more than I ever would have thought someone could miss a Holmes. But I don’t _miss_ him. I can’t anymore. I just… can’t.”

 

The car slowed down and gently pulled off to the side of the road. John looked out and noticed the all too familiar front door of 221 Baker Street, its gold numbering gleaming under the streetlights.

 

“Why?” John asked.

 

“For old time’s sake,” Mycroft said, a cool edge returning to his voice. “Mrs. Hudson’s sorted it all out for you. I thought, perhaps, you might like one last night to say goodbye properly… to this life, that is.  To make sure you’re ready to start fresh with Ms. Morstan.”

 

“I’ve already let it go.”

 

“Please, Dr. Watson.”

 

John sighed and shook his head, confused but too tired to make a fuss now. He was over this, over Baker Street and over Sherlock Holmes. He could survive the shadows and the ghosts of 221B for one more night. It didn’t seem that Mycroft was giving him much choice.

 

“I’ll send a car for you in the morning to take you to the church. Everything you need should be in your room,” Mycroft said as John climbed out of the car. He slammed the door without saying anything more to the elder Holmes and approached the once-familiar house with careful steps.

 

It was already unlocked.

 

John took the 17 stairs up to his old flat slowly. The fourth stair creaked like it always had before. He frowned as the loud noise ripped through the mausoleum-like stillness of the house, as if the disruption would awake the slumbering ghosts he swore he no longer feared. Still, for no rational reason whatsoever, he was suddenly scared.

 

The door at the top of the stairs as unlocked as well and when he pushed it open, there he was, John’s bespoke specter: Sherlock Holmes.


	2. Chapter 2

If he had turned around that second, just pivoted on his heel without a word and calmly retreated down those 17 steps and out the front door to the street, if he had hailed a cab in the middle of the night and had it drive him all the way across the city despite the cost, if he had disregarded tradition and climbed into bed with his fiancée on the night before their wedding, John Watson would have gotten married believing that Sherlock Holmes was still dead.

 

Because if John had only looked upon this ghost for a second, if he had merely glimpsed him, he would never have believed it was Sherlock.

 

The figure was tall and lean, but not at all gracefully so—he was a skeleton now with pallid skin stretched over his bones, his hair shorn short and fried from being blond, black, ginger… anything to stay hidden, to stay a step ahead. His cheeks were sunken in not unlike his brother’s and the shadows under his eyes were deep and dark, a place for shameful deeds and unspoken horrors. Torn jeans were hanging off his hips, held up by a slim brown belt instead of belly fat or muscle. He was wearing the t-shirt of a band John had never heard of, a band John would now hate on principle. There was no color in his lips and his cupid’s bow, always so distinctive, was all but lost at this distance. John didn’t want to believe this was Sherlock.

 

But John was frozen in place and because he didn’t turn around that second, because he didn’t flee quick enough and the figure took a timid step towards him, John knew it was, for better or worse, Sherlock Holmes—knew it was him like one knows someone in a dream, even when their hair is wrong and their clothes are wrong and their face is wrong. Somehow you still recognize that it’s them and your heart pounds and you wake up in the middle of the night screaming.

 

“John,” he said, his voice cracking as if were an instrument used much too infrequently.

 

“Sherlock.”

 

“I’m… well, I’m not dead. So there’s that.”

 

“So it would seem.” John’s voice was steady, and when he thought back on that moment he wouldn’t know how. In his memory of that night he was shaking with anger, his fists clenched, his teeth grinding against each other. But in Sherlock’s memory John was very still, calm. Sherlock would say that John’s lips quirked in something almost like a smile.

 

That must have been the case—the quirking lips—or surely Sherlock would not have acted as he did. Which is to say, with John standing stock-still in the doorway, Sherlock’s steps lost their timidity and he closed the distance between him and his old flatmate in half a dozen large strides. Sherlock’s legs wobbled, John noticed, barely sticks and barely able to hold up the weight of his body, but there was something akin to relief on his hollow, shaded features.

 

Sherlock was going to try and hug him, John was sure of it. Sherlock had never hugged John in the nearly two years they’d known each other, but watching him move across the living room with his lips pulling slowly across his face, his eyes drooping gratefully as if a burden had suddenly been lifted from his shoulders, John was stricken with the realization that it was going to happen now.

 

So naturally, John, whose lips did not quirk because he was suppressing a smile but from the strain of keeping his anger in check—because he was angry, there would be no doubt about that in the future—reeled back and punched Sherlock straight in the face. He didn’t feel the burn of his swollen knuckles until much later.

 

Sherlock stumbled back, his eyes suddenly wide in shock—or was it fear? He looked much like a struck puppy but John wasn’t thinking about that, wasn’t thinking how the bruise that would bloom across Sherlock’s nose and under his eyes would only compliment the much too fresh set of bruises spread across Sherlock’s neck in the shape of fingertips; or his wrists, which were yellow and brown now, running around the sharp bone like a bracelet.

 

For a moment John felt better. Much better.

 

Sherlock’s hands were cupped over his face and he retreated a few steps back into the empty room. This time it was John that stepped closer.

 

John wanted to make Sherlock feel, make him hurt. A vengeful streak came over him and he wanted to say something—anything—that would bring Sherlock to his knees, as John had been, in grief. He wanted to strike him again, watch blood spill from a split lip or a crushed cheekbone. He wanted proof that Sherlock could even do that: bleed. Obviously the blood that had pooled around him like a halo on that day at Bart’s had not been his own.

 

But John could no longer guess what might affect Sherlock so. The truth was, he didn't know the man anymore, couldn’t even guess if he had a heart capable of being affected. John had spent so long wishing he could take back those last words, that last, "You machine," spewed in disbelief and frustration. He had spent three years wondering how he could have been so wrong.

 

Except he hadn't been and he knew it now. Tears on the rooftop, a voice caught in the throat—that had been the magic trick. Playing human. Sherlock's most despised pastime.

 

 

 

 

Sherlock had leapt from a building to his “death,” had told his “only friend” goodbye and had disappeared without him, without considering John at all.

 

Sherlock was a machine. And John very much doubted any degree of guilt or anger or anguish could ever break that porcelain little facade.

 

He would not get to Sherlock Holmes, would not make him feel pain, or guilt, or regret. And because of his, John wished to do nothing except turn on his heel and disappear out the door, disappear from Baker Street once more, just as Sherlock himself had done, just as John thought he himself had done three years ago. Let him be dead to Sherlock Holmes this time.

 

John watched Sherlock for a moment, saw the man flinch when he took a step forward. The once great detective was hunched over now, still clutching his face, eyeing John warily. His eyes were dull—John was finally close enough to notice. They were bloodshot and a little yellow, but more than anything they were dull. They didn’t flicker with deductions or blaze forth with life and interest and excitement. There was no fire in Sherlock now. Quite right, too, John thought. Fire would have implied warmth; with Sherlock there was only ice—cool and hard, methodical; the perfect murder weapon, John had heard it called once. An icicle to the heart and all the evidence melts away with the spring.

 

Except if John was honest, Sherlock didn't look like anything so strong as ice. If he had once been, then June had done a number on him, leaving him but the thinnest crust of frost, dirty and frail, at a lake’s edge.

 

John’s shoulders slouched forward as his military instincts receded ever so slightly. Sherlock still looked as if he didn’t trust the former soldier not to break his jaw.

 

“I had no idea you would be so affected,” Sherlock murmured, slowly drawing his hands away from his face. John had indeed drawn blood, which Sherlock’s protective gesture had unintentionally smeared across his upper lip. John was still a doctor and his instinct was very much to go to Sherlock, take his face gently in his hands and examine the injury. But he resisted.

 

“You didn’t think—? Jesus, Sherlock.” John shook his head, stepping away as Sherlock straightened up, wiping his bloodied palms on the front of his jeans, which were already rife with stains and unfashionable tears. The unconscious action reminded John once more that this man was nothing like the Sherlock Holmes he had known.

 

“If you’d just let me explain—“ Sherlock began.

 

“No, no. I don’t want to hear it. I _really_ don’t.” John, wary of showing his back to Sherlock—old habits die hard—remained facing his ghost of a flatmate as he stepped backwards out of the room. Sherlock’s eyes went wide once more and he lunged at the doctor—his doctor—despite the real threat of further bodily harm.

 

“John, don’t go. Please don’t go,” he half-cried, his hands latching onto the lapels of John’s jacket. John saw a hint of madness in Sherlock’s wild eyes in that moment. It should’ve stirred in him a sort of pity, but John found that oddly it did not. He did not pity Sherlock. He did not pity the cruel. He would not pity someone who could so ruthlessly manipulate a friend. John would leave, flee. Let Sherlock Holmes engineer a new puppet to amuse himself with.

 

“Congratu-bloody-lations on not being dead, mate. Good for you. Have a fine time being alive. But don’t expect me to have any part of it,” John spat, prying Sherlock’s fingers from his jacket before giving him a slight shove. The rough touch elicited a small whimper from the detective. Sherlock wrapped his arms around himself as he stumbled back and gazed at John, unbelieving.

 

“John—“

 

“No, Sherlock. We’re not friends anymore. Understand that. We have no place being part of each other’s lives—if we ever did. I don’t know you at all,” John finished.

 

“Don’t go, John, please don’t go,” Sherlock begged— _begged_. With his arms still hugging his torso and his shoulders hunched forward, John had never seen Sherlock look quite so defeated. He had never heard Sherlock’s voice break quite like that… except once. The last time.

 

“I know you, John, I’ll always know you. You’re working at a private clinic now in Highgate,” Sherlock began, his eyes finally flickering over the whole of John’s person. His cheeks flushed; he’d forgotten what it felt like to be deduced. “The clinic is close to home—a one-room flat you share with your… girlfriend. You walk to work on good days and bad. You’ve begun joining some old mates for pick-up games of rugby on the Heath even though your shoulder has been telling you to give it a rest. You’ve just come from an unusually decadent dinner in the city. You’re…” Sherlock faltered for a minute, his eyes catching John’s eyes. John saw shock there, and what he knew—but would not admit—to be a deep, irreparable sadness. “You’re getting married in the morning,” the detective said quietly. “Mycroft hadn’t said.”

 

He paused.

 

“You can’t leave me,” Sherlock nearly whispered, looking away. John’s voice got caught in his throat and while he said nothing, he had stopped backing away.

 

“This isn’t happening,” John murmured, shaking his head.

 

“I did this for you,” Sherlock began, his voice still low. “You don’t know that because you won’t let me explain but I did this for _you_. All of it was for you. To keep you alive, to keep you safe. Please don’t leave.”

 

“I’m not the one that bloody well left, Sherlock,” John said once he was able, a resigned tone

beating out the intended hostility of the statement.

 

“I didn’t have a choice.”

 

“Well… I do.”

 

Sherlock’s head snapped up and he locked eyes with John, as if such an intimate gesture would make it impossible for the man to walk away. And if John was honest, he suddenly found the idea of fleeing gut-wrenchingly awful. A weight had settled in the doctor’s stomach, making him ill, making it impossible for him to step back, making it _fucking impossible, god dammit_ to look away from this ghost of Sherlock Holmes, all collapsing lines and sentiment—a very shadow of the man he had once been.

 

“He would have killed you,” Sherlock said.

 

“Who would have?”

 

“Moriarty.” John hadn’t heard the name in years but as soon as it was spoken, it felt like the whole room was infected with it, that dark cruelty that had seeped into their lives without them ever noticing until it was too late. Until it had ruined everything.

 

“What do you mean?” Without even being aware it was what he was doing, John was giving Sherlock a chance—a chance to talk, to explain, to be forgiven. None of it would be that simple but Sherlock finally had his glimmer of hope, his one very last chance to not lose forever the man he’d slowly been losing for the past three years.

 

“That day, at Bart’s. On the rooftop. Moriarty told me. You knew he would try—God, John, please tell me you knew he’d try?” Sherlock’s voice was strained, desperate. He was frustrating himself as much as he was John by talking circles around the one thing he needed to say most.

 

“What do you mean? Try what?”

 

“To burn the heart out of me!” he shouted. John took a step back, the weight in the stomach rocking him further away from the unnervingly raw display of emotion. A shiver went up his spine; he most certainly did not recognize this man anymore.

 

“My heart, John, my heart,” Sherlock continued, throwing himself into a small tizzy. He began to pace around the room, which was empty save Sherlock’s chair. John hadn’t noticed before, hadn’t had the time or the faculties to take much in besides Sherlock Holmes being alive. John vaguely wondered what Mrs. Hudson had ended up doing with all of Sherlock’s belongings—the ones John couldn’t bear to touch. Or what had become of everything he had left behind, for that matter—the pieces of a life he was certain he had no use for anymore.

 

“Moriarty promised to burn the heart out of me, you must remember that. You do remember that, don’t you?” he stopped pacing to look at John, who nodded dumbly. “On the roof he told me. A sniper. A bullet straight through your skull. I had to jump, I had to die. It was the only way you wouldn’t. Do you understand?” Sherlock’s pacing eventually led him to stand right in front of John. He grabbed his old friend’s shoulders and gave him a quick shake. John flinched and looked away.

 

“You ‘died’ to save me?” John asked to the wall.

 

“Yes,” Sherlock said, assuming the doctor finally understood, assuming forgiveness was on the horizon with their whole new life to follow.

 

“Well, I never asked you to.” John grabbed Sherlock’s hands, which were still resting on his shoulders, and shoved them away.

 

“But I—what?”

 

“Did Mycroft know?” John was speaking to the floor now, though he had straightened his back and squared his shoulders. Sherlock gave him a pained look as if to say, _At ease, soldier_.

 

“Yes. He was… necessary.”

 

“Who else?”

 

“Who else what?”

 

“God dammit, Sherlock! Who else bloody well knew you weren’t dead?” John raised his head at last and looked straight ahead, focusing his eyes on a patch of wall behind, just to the left of Sherlock’s ear.

 

“Molly. She was necessary, as well.”

 

“But I wasn’t.”

 

“John—“

 

“No, shut up, Sherlock,” John said sternly, jabbing a finger roughly against Sherlock’s sternum. “So what, Mycroft gave you money and Molly helped you do it—fuck if I want to know how. So it was planned. You had time to account for all the variables, rightly predict Moriarty’s next five moves because you’re Sherlock bloody Holmes and you’re a genius, and execute some elaborate exit strategy. You told your brother, you told Molly Hooper, but me—your ‘only friend,’ let’s say—no, I didn’t deserve to know about any of it. Is that pretty much it?”

 

John was properly seething now, his stoic military façade crumbling ever only so slightly as his hands curled into shaking fists at his side. His eyes glazed over in anger, frustration, betrayal, and when he looked at Sherlock once more, the detective was struck dumb by the glare.

 

“It won’t happen again,” Sherlock croaked.

 

“No, I said, is that it? Have I got it pretty much right?” John said again.

 

“Yes, that’s about it,” Sherlock said.

 

“Of course it is. Fuck you, Sherlock.”

 

“Jesus, John, I just told you I died for you! I jumped off a fucking building for you! Does that mean nothing?” Sherlock hollered. He clutched at his stomach as if his insides were being torn apart by John’s dull, uninterested eyes. But suddenly they flickered, the fire in them burning once again, and John rounded on him.

 

"I don't give a shit, you bloody wanker! You left me, that's what you did. Do you not get that? I would've jumped with you had I had the choice. I would have chased you around the goddamn world. Whatever you’ve been doing for the past three years, we could have done it together. But you didn't let me. You never gave me the choice. And there will never come a day when I won’t hate you for that."

 

Sherlock looked stricken.

 

He should have left, of course; punched Sherlock one more time for good measure and slipped down those fateful stairs. He should have disappeared from Baker Street for good. But the simple truth was that John Watson was getting married tomorrow— _today, fuck,_ he realized—and he had never felt more exhausted in his entire life.

 

“It’s late,” John said dumbly, having taken a moment to steady himself. Breathe in, breathe out. “Look, Sherlock. Whatever happened, happened, and now you’re here. I assume there was a reason you came back. I don’t want to hear it, but whatever it is, now you can get on with. None of it affects me. I won’t go through any of that with you again. I just won’t. It was a different life. I’m just crashing here tonight and then… and then we part as men who once knew each other. I don’t know. Whatever. It will never be the same but we’ve both survived worse. I’m sure you’ll work fine without your blogger—you’ve been doing it for three years, after all.”

 

Sherlock’s eyes were wide and for the life of him he couldn’t find the words for a response, just the right ones that would stop John from bowing his head in resignation. This was not how it was supposed to happen. This was wrong, all wrong. John was his—would always be his. Except he wasn’t, and here he was telling Sherlock in no uncertain terms exactly that. Sherlock felt bits of himself inside start to crumble away.

 

So while Sherlock remained standing like a bruised Renaissance sculpture in the living room, John crossed to the kitchen and to the stairs that led up to his old room. He began climbing them with heavy legs. 

 

“I didn’t know about Mary. Mycroft never mentioned her,” Sherlock said when John was half way to the top. The beaten down detective was standing at the base of the stairs when he spoke, John knew, though he didn’t yet turn around; of course Sherlock would move through the flat with the silence of a cat. John should have known better than to believe the detective would let this go. Sherlock was not done making his case for absolution.

 

“What has she got to do with anything?” John asked.

 

“She has to do with everything, John. Obviously. If I’d know about her… I wouldn’t have bothered coming back. I wouldn’t have… disrupted you by coming back. Maybe that’s why Mycroft never said. Sentiment.”

 

“I suppose you expected to come back and find me a shell of a man, haunting this flat, carefully tending all the relics you left behind,” he said with a sigh.  Sherlock’s silence told him that yes, that was exactly what he had expected.

 

“I must admit I did… not hope, exactly, but I thought—I thought you would, perhaps, still… consider me, from time to time.” Sherlock’s voice was very measured, his words carefully chosen, but John heard everything Sherlock was not staying: _You are right. I thought you would wait for me. I thought you understood that I would come back, that I would always come back for you. How could you ever believe I would leave you like that? I was always going to come back, John. I thought you would keep our life warm for me while I was gone. And I am sorry for that. I did not expect it to be this hard, John._

Mycroft had warned Sherlock. Tried to, anyway, when he’d finally reappeared on his brother’s doorstep in Kensington the day before, clothes falling off him like dirty rags hung over bleached bone. He’d been sat down in front of the hearth in Mycroft’s study and been handed two fingers of scotch when Mycroft said to him:

 

_“Do you really think you’ll just be able to stroll leisurely back into John Watson’s life?”_

 

_“Yes, of course. Obviously.”_

_“I don’t think it will be quite so easy, little brother.”_

_“Why wouldn’t it be?”_

_“Three years is a long time, Sherlock. For those of us who do not chase the world as it turns. Three years can be a whole lifetime to those forced to stand still and watch it go past.”_

_“I don’t understand what you’re going on about. Something soppy, no doubt. How unlike you, Mycroft.”_

_“Just… be prepared, Sherlock.”_

_“For what?” Sherlock’s eyes narrowed at his brother, the scotch burning in his empty stomach. Mycroft shrugged._

_“I suspect you’ll find a very different man than you are expecting, is all. John Watson isn’t your blogger anymore. I don’t suspect he thinks of himself as your anything, anymore.”_

_“You don’t give him enough credit.”_

_“And you give him too much. People, Sherlock, people like John Watson… they move on from things like this. In time. They have to, to cope. To survive.” His brother’s voice had been soft—unusually so.  Gone was his sarcastic lilt, the hint of condescension that had so long defined their fraternity._

_Sherlock hadn’t had a retort. He was too distracted by the sudden pain of his insides twisting in on themselves, spurred on by the spread of fear from his reptilian brain. Mycroft couldn’t be right, Sherlock reasoned… except that he could._

_When his brother touched his shoulder before retiring to bed, the gentle intimacy had sent a shiver down Sherlock’s spine…_

                      

“And instead it’s me that’s the shell, John. I’m… tired. Of running, of hiding. You don’t know, you have no idea. I’m just tired and… alone. I thought, I hoped, at least, once I finally came home, I wouldn’t be anymore. I didn’t think dying would hurt so much.” John was silent, staring down at him from his perch halfway up the stairs. "Please, John, don’t leave. I've been alone for so long."

 

“I was, too, Sherlock. Because of you. All of this is your fault, don’t you get that?” His voice was damp now. The change was so minute only Sherlock Holmes would have noticed.

 

"Not like this, don't leave me like this. Not like this, please," Sherlock begged, finally collapsing. His knees hit the wood floor with a painful thud. It was John’s turn to be the machine.

 

"Good night, Sherlock." John turned his back on that once-upon-a-time-great man, his once-upon-a-time-flatmate, his once-upon-a-time-friend, and vanished into his once-upon-a-time-bedroom, one last time.

 

\---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ----------

 

Perhaps it is a wonder that John Watson got to sleep at all that night, but he did—and slept rather soundly at that, he thought upon waking. His body ached a bit as he stretched out on the once-familiar mattress and untangled himself from a mass of un-familiar sheets, but it wasn’t an unpleasant ache; it was the sort that reminded one of having lived a certain amount the day before, the sort of soreness John hadn’t felt in ages.

 

With his eyes still closed against the day, for a very brief moment, it was like the last three years had been nothing more than a nasty little dream.  He thought about the heaviness of his limbs and the rawness still settled in the back of his throat and he felt very much like he once had felt quite often, after cases: physically exhausted and mentally wrecked. It took him a second too long to remember just why he felt so hallowed out, why his chest somehow felt so much lighter. A second too long because allowing himself to live with that fantasy for even a second made the pain in his heart that much more acute when he finally opened his eyes and _remembered_.

 

Sherlock.

 

His chest did not feel lighter. It felt emptier… as though some vital part of him had been ripped out and torn to bits… as if he hadn’t had the time to fit all the pieces back into place properly.

 

Sherlock.

 

John let out a groan and sat up, opening his eyes slowly. He hadn’t taken stock of the room when he stumbled into it the night before—he hadn’t even bothered switching on the light; he’d felt perfectly justified in falling into bed in his clothes and passing out a minute later. In the harsh light of morning John had time to feel the distinct sadness that comes with seeing a room completely emptied of you. Gone were his jumpers that always hung over the backside of the chair in the corner, the framed photo of his parents from his bedside table, the vintage army recruitment posters that had hung on the far wall, the ones Sherlock had found at a car boot sale in Sussex and gifted him for his birthday three years earlier.

 

This wasn’t a place he lived anymore. It was another thing he had allowed himself to forget for that one second.

 

John’s mobile was nearly dead, with just enough juice in it for him to read an early morning text from a blocked number announcing that a car would be waiting outside of Baker Street at 10am. It was nearly 9:30am.

 

With another yawn, John pulled himself out of bed, and though the thought introduced a vague queasiness to his stomach, started downstairs.

 

John wasn’t sure what he’d find, exactly. He didn’t know if Sherlock would have locked himself in his own old room or passed out on the couch in the living room that was new, that wasn’t theirs. He didn’t know if Sherlock had slept at all, though the man he had observed the night before did not have the same vitality as the one he had once known; he could barely hold himself up tall half the time, more less stay up all night fidgeting with a violin or a microscope—both of which John doubted were in the vicinity anyway. He doubted Sherlock had awoken early and gone out to fetch them both coffee and breakfast; but he also knew stranger things had happened.

 

Stranger things than that had happened to him in the past 12 hours alone.

 

The flat was unnervingly quiet as John made his way downstairs and into the kitchen—not only was there no violin or the gentle clinging of glassware, suggesting someone was moving around, having a morning cuppa; but Baker Street itself seemed unusually silent. Gone were the cabs and the early morning commuters and the moms with their prams heading towards Regent's Park. John wasn't fond of so much quiet.

 

Sherlock.

 

The door to his old bedroom was open, as it has been when John had stormed past it the night before, but it was dark and empty within. Instead John found Sherlock in the living room.

 

Sherlock was not passed out on the new floral divan like John had guessed, but rather he had somehow found a way to fold his entire body up in his old leather chair—the only thing of his (theirs?) left in the flat.

 

His legs were curled beneath him with his upper body draped over the side. He looked decidedly uncomfortable, with his arms wrapped tightly around his skeleton of a body. He looked even tinier with the daylight streaming in through the dusty windows, illuminating his waxy skin, his greasy hair, his bones sticking out in all sorts of unusual ways. John could see the bruising more clearly now—not just the discoloration around his nose and under his eyes that John had caused the night before, but the purple finger prints across his neck and the splotches around his wrists, up his left arm. His t-shirt was loose and John could see the shadows cast by Sherlock's protruding clavicle.

 

And he was shaking. Almost violently.

 

John felt frozen in place.

 

Sherlock's lips fell open an inch and a vague moan escaped them, followed a moment later by a series of frantic groans and a handful of mumbled pleas. "No," followed a "Please," and the whole scene was punctuated with a firm whisper: "John."

 

A nightmare.

 

John had suffered his share of them of course, terrible ones, ones filled with all the horrors of his life, filled with all the things he could never stop, or fix, or take back, or change. They would play out on a loop behind his eyelids, forever—a punishment for some unknown sin, his own eternal damnation on earth.

 

Yet somehow, standing half-way in the kitchen and half-way in the living room, one foot in his new life and one in his old, watching a man he once knew twitch, watching his fists clench and unclench, hearing his teeth grinding down against each other while his eyes moved rapidly beneath their lids—signs of a sleeping mind reeling—was even worse. Watching what was once brilliant, once special, once unique, reduced into THIS, this nightmare-ridden ghost of a man, something so ordinary and unremarkable John had managed it for years, was incomprehensible.

 

John approached Sherlock cautiously, his bare feet quiet against the wood floors, weighing his options.

 

One of his options was to fix himself a cuppa, take a quick piss, and slip out of the flat as if the past ten hours had been nothing. Part of him knew it was best not to try and rouse Sherlock from depths of this night—or rather mid-morning—terror, and he looked like he needed sleep more than anything, no matter how disturbed. Anyway, John had a church to be at soon, where an old rugby mate would be waiting to stand beside him as his Best Man.

 

His other option was to keep going, to close the gap between him and Sherlock, to lay a strong and calloused hand on that boney shoulder of his, give him a good shake, and watch the detective's eyes come back to life like he had dreamed he could do so many times before. Sherlock would gasp and shutter and fall towards John with more apologies on his lips and then... what? What then? John had no idea. There was still a church waiting for him at the end of all this; the start of another life.

 

But why shouldn't he go with the first one? What loyalty did he owe to Sherlock anymore? He had given him enough, would have given him his life—but Sherlock hadn't wanted it, hadn't cared a thing for it. So John should go. He should leave. He should give his life to someone with gentle hands and a heart, someone who did not leak oil like a machine and leave a trail of despair in his wake. He didn't owe Sherlock anything, anymore. He did not owe him the relief of saving him from his nightmares nor the relief of forgiving him his trespasses.

 

And John most certainly did not owe Sherlock a place in this brand new life, the one he was trying so very hard to build atop the ashes of an old, nearly forgotten one. He tried to remind himself he didn’t know this man anymore, the tiny one all folded up in this great chair. He didn’t know him at all now… if he ever had. John had lived a whole life without Sherlock. He’d survived birthdays and Christmases and funerals without Sherlock, had survived Sunday night telly and the new Indian place around the corner without Sherlock. How does one go back from that? One doesn’t. One can’t.

 

Anyway, Sherlock hated weddings.

 

Detested, them, actually. If John remembered correctly. And he did.

 

It’d come up once, ages and ages ago now, when the two were having a questionably domestic night in with a curry and a few beers (on John’s part). John had just been dumped for the umpteenth time since moving in with Sherlock and had been moaning about this abysmal dating record, when Sherlock had made the proclamation:

 

“Really, John. I’m not sure why you keep bothering with this dating nonsense. Whatever you’re doing, it’s obviously not working.  What do you mean to get out of all this, anyway? A wife?” Sherlock had laughed at this. “If that’s honestly what you’re after, please see fit to lose my invitation in the post. I absolutely loathe weddings.”

 

John had felt irrationally annoyed at the time, and he’d quickly snapped back, with very little thought, “Piss off. Just because no one in their right mind would ever agree to marry a Holmes, don’t force your Grinch heart on the rest of us. And what makes you think I would want to invite you in the first place, you poncy git?” He blamed his loose tongue on the empty beer bottles lying at his feet. He immediately tried to laugh the comment away but Sherlock was already on his feet. John thought he caught a flash of something in his friend’s eye as he got up, something not unlike hurt or, perhaps, betrayal.

 

“Sherlock,” he had moaned apologetically at the detective’s back as he retreated into the kitchen.

 

“No, you’re quite right, John.” Sherlock had set down firmly at the kitchen table and buried his face in his microscope. They hadn’t spoken for the rest of the night. Lestrade had phoned in the morning with a case and the incident became another dropped line between them, never to be drudged back up.

 

Until now.

 

John still wanted to leave. He wanted to leave but he didn’t want to run away because John Watson did not run away from things. He was not that sort of man.

 

He watched Sherlock shaking for just a moment longer before he made his decision.

 

As much as he wanted to leave he wouldn’t. He couldn’t. Because he had been Sherlock. Years and years ago he had been this man, a shell, having come back from a war to a world that didn’t recognize him anymore, unable to stop shaking, unable to sleep through the night. He had been this. But then he had met Sherlock and after one half-insane jog around the city by this man’s side, he had stopped shaking. After a sleepless night spent flipping through a dead man’s books with Sherlock hovering behind him, he had stopped being unable to sleep. The nightmares had gone dark within a month of moving into Baker Street—a month that had be filled with murders and kidnappings and armed robberies. John had slept like a baby through it all, knowing Sherlock was just downstairs. Knowing that monsters never accompanied a midnight rendition of Chaconne from Partita in D Minor.

 

Sherlock had saved him from what might have been, from himself and the things he had done and the things that had happened to him.

 

Sherlock had been his reprieve.

 

John Watson did not think there was much he owed Sherlock Holmes. But he thought perhaps he owed the great detective a reprieve, from himself and the things that he done and the things that had happened to him. At last he knew he owed him that.

 

So he strode forward, swiftly and quietly, and though he had intended to grab the detective by his shoulders and give him a good shake, he didn’t. Instead John fell to his knees in front of Sherlock’s chair and stared at the man’s quivering fingers. He had shifted in the time John had been thinking, and though one arm was still wrapped tightly around him, his fingers digging into his ribs—which John was sure would be all too visible if he lifted up Sherlock’s t-shirt to look—the other arm was dangling off the armrest, its shaking fingers flexing every few seconds in time with Sherlock’s shallow inhales.

 

John pressed his palm against Sherlock’s and entwined their fingers, as if he could hold them still by shear force of will. Sure enough, the tension seemed to leak out of Sherlock’s limbs. He brought Sherlock’s hand to his mouth and ghosted his lips over the back of it, inexplicably.

 

“What have you done to yourself, Sherlock?” John whispered against the younger man’s cool flesh.

 

Kneeling like he was, John’s jeans stretched tightly over his thighs, and the small box shoved deep within one of his pockets began digging into his leg in a mildly painful fashion. He dropped Sherlock’s hand and fished the annoying box out of his jeans with a small grimace, flipping the box open. Their rings—his and Mary’s, the simple gold bands they were set to exchange in a few hours, with simple words they’d mean, in front of a few dozen people who’d believe them.

 

John toyed with one of the rings for a moment before slipping it on his finger. It fit like a glove, just as it was meant to. He didn’t know why he hadn’t expected that.

 

The other ring looked lonely in the box all on its own and John plucked that one out as well, discarding the empty felt box by his knees. Above him Sherlock shifted and for no reason at all, John grabbed the detective’s hand again and slipped the gold band around his third finger. The ring shouldn’t have fit. Mary’s hands were properly tiny and Sherlock was all man, but it did. The ring slipped over his first and second knuckle with an ease that would have been impossible three years ago and John gave a horrified shudder. So did Sherlock.

 

All of a sudden the younger man seized and gave a great gasp. His eyes shot open, pools of dark grey that wished so often to be blue, and locked with John’s. Sherlock straightened up quickly and then shrunk away from John, folding up in his chair even tighter than before. John, startled, fell onto his bum and scurried backwards a few inches on his hands and feet.

 

“You’re still here,” Sherlock murmured, more to himself than anything. John nodded dumbly.

 

“Apparently.”

 

“Why are you still here?” he asked, eyeing John suspiciously. His arms were wrapped around his torso tightly, though he slowly began to un-tuck his legs and lower his feet to the floor.

 

“What do you mean?” John stayed sitting.

 

“You said you were leaving. Over and over again last night you said you were leaving. You’re getting married today.”

 

“I am,” John said in a daze. The words sounded as if they were spoken not in agreement but in an attempt to convince the speaker of their validity. 

 

“Then leave. Get married,” Sherlock demanded. He seemed to frown at his own command but he steeled his face just as quickly, sliding into place the mask of nonchalance John never thought he’d see again on the great detective’s face. Sherlock gave his mangled locks a graceless shake and raised his chin absurdly high; it was a challenge of sorts, a test. His eyes were still locked with John’s.

 

“Is it 10 o’clock yet?”

 

“What?” That hadn’t been any of the answers Sherlock had been expecting, and his mask faltered, showing his confusion and distaste.

 

“Mycroft is sending a car for me at 10.”

 

“Of course he is,” Sherlock huffed, settling back into himself, into the game.

 

“You… can come, if you’d like.”

 

John hadn’t been certain that was going to be his next move until he said it, and there it was, the olive branch he never would have extended the night before, the white flag, the glimmer of hope that not all had to be lost—that maybe everything that dies really does one day come back, and that should be a fine thing.

 

“I don’t suppose you will—you told me once you hated weddings. But… you could. You can. Whatever.” John sighed and thrust himself up onto his feet, turning quickly towards the kitchen so as to avoid Sherlock’s dropped-jaw and doe-eyed look, the gaunt and disheveled detective looking as helpless and hopeless as ever at John’s offering.

 

John didn’t make himself tea, in the end, but coffee, thick and black enough to keep demons at bay, skeletons in their closets, and unspoken words between dead friends unspoken. The noise of the act echoed through the quiet flat. Sherlock hadn’t moved and the clock was running down.

 

John left his mug in the sink and disappeared for a quick shower, and when he emerged again—a little more human than he’d been ten minutes earlier—Sherlock was standing at the kitchen counter, nursing the mug of coffee (black, two sugars) John had left for him. He wasn’t leaning his hip casually against the counter, sipping ruefully at the drink as was once his custom—his spine remained hunched, his body small against the expanse of the clutter-less room, and he was holding the cup under his nose with both hands, breathing it in, looking skittish.

 

John cleared his throat.

 

“There’s a car waiting for you downstairs,” Sherlock said into his coffee, keeping his eyes low and averted.

 

“You’re not coming then?” John asked. There was a hint of disappointment in his voice, which must have surprised Sherlock as much as it did John, for the detective’s eyes snapped up.

 

“Surely you weren’t actually expecting me to? You said yourself you know how much I detest weddings.” Though he didn’t yet look like himself, Sherlock was beginning to sound the part, his voice one part surly and two parts condescending.

 

“Yes, I just thought…” John’s voice trailed off as he focused on a spot on the wall above Sherlock’s shoulder.

 

“What?” Sherlock’s voice was sharper now, curious and cruel.

 

“Nothing.”

 

“You only asked to be polite.”

 

“You’re right.”

 

“You don’t actually want me to come.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Mary’s nice.”

 

“How would you know?”

 

“Mycroft.”

 

“Of course.”

 

Standing on opposite sides of the kitchen the men seemed a world away from one other, two dusty soldiers, survivors of their own separate wars, bruised in places neither could see, stitched together in places that didn’t make sense. They were ragdoll versions of themselves, the great men they once were or might one day have been, unable to say anything that mattered, that might have fixed them both—not because they didn’t want to, but simply because they didn’t know such words existed. Neither could imagine the sentence that might close the distance between them, those silly two feet that constituted three years of separate life.

 

They looked everywhere except at each other, with Sherlock noticing everything that unimportant about John and John only noticing what was important about Sherlock. Sherlock knew that John hadn’t used shampoo in the shower, only conditioner. John knew that Sherlock had believed him wholeheartedly the night before when he insisted that there was no place for him in John’s life anymore.

 

“I guess I’ll be off then,” John finally said.

 

Sherlock gave a curt nod. He had stayed awake long after John had gone to bed, practicing, steeling himself to give the goodbye he hadn’t been ready to accept last night. John had had three years to learn he could live without Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock had only given himself three hours. It was his great fear come true, the reality Mycroft had tried to prepare him for: John didn’t need him anymore. Sherlock’s brilliance was nothing to this man now—not impressive, not important, not necessary.

 

“Goodbye, John.”

 

_No, don’t._

 

The words hung in the air, ringing and echoing and smashing John’s insides to bits. But he was made of stronger stuff than he knew and returned Sherlock’s curt nod, back straight and chin high. Sherlock recognized the stance, the military precision of his movements, another cruel imitation of a choked plea so many years ago.

_Don’t be… dead._

 

Sherlock hadn’t heard the words but he’d felt them somehow, as he watched with dead-like eyes the tiny soldier man stand at attention before an empty grave, watched him turn away with trained ease.

 

John had needed to hear those words from Sherlock. He needed to be let go of properly and he needed it to be his choice, to go or to stay. But now that Sherlock had given it to him, given him exactly what he _needed_ , he realized he didn’t _want_ it at all. He didn’t want the responsibility of any of this on his shoulders. He didn’t need the weight of another goodbye, another shattered calm. He didn’t want to be let go of. He didn’t want to let go.

 

The reality of the situation hit him suddenly and panic seized his heart, but there was nothing to be done.

 

“I would have asked you to be my best man,” John said quietly from the edge of the kitchen, as he was turning to leave. His voice sounded like a man too used to talking to ghosts, too used to talking about them. In those words Sherlock heard what John really needed, really wanted: to believe that Sherlock was still dead. John needed to believe that his best friend would not do the unspeakably cruel thing that he had done, and if John was to survive, Sherlock would have to remain dead for him.

 

One cannot expect to pretend to die and be allowed to live afterwards.

 

One cannot expect a friend to see your halo of blood and then allow you to come back to life. Back into their life.

 

This is where Sherlock Holmes would disappear completely. If needs must.

 

“That was always your problem, John. You always thought me too good a man.”

 

“But not this time.”

 

“This time? No.”

 

“Goodbye, Sherlock.”

 

The sound of the front door shutting reverberated throughout the flat, as if slammed. John had done no such thing, though. He had exited calmly—grace under pressure—with his back to Sherlock and his shoulders squared. For his part, Sherlock kept his eyes trained on his cold coffee, which nearly perfectly reflected back to him his gaunt and grimy face.

 

When Sherlock heard the roaring of an engine and tires peeling away from Baker Street, he allowed himself to collapse completely, the coffee mug crashing to the floor only moments before his body came sinking down beside it. Sherlock inhaled sharply and brought his hands to his face to scrub at the worthless thing, all tired eyes and a bruised nose and a mouth that would never say the right things at the right time.

 

It was then that he finally noticed the cold sting of the gold band wrapped around his ring finger.

                                                                                         

“Oh, John,” he cursed.


	3. Chapter 3

When John dreamed of Sherlock coming back— _if_ he dreamed about it, let’s say, because John was not prepared yet to admit he ever had—this was not how it went. And when Sherlock dreamed of coming back to John—and really it was the only thing he dreamed about, if he was honest, though of course he hadn’t yet had the chance to be that honest—this was not how it went.

 

They could have agreed on that, that no, this wasn’t how this was supposed to go. They had both dreamed of better. But this was what they got.

 

There never really was any chance that coming back wouldn’t destroy bits of them both, completely, because that’s how returns always are. People just don’t think about it until it’s too late. They’re too busy putting themselves back together after shattering farewells to realize that those cracks will also be there now, that returns will not heal them but merely make them come apart again quicker, sharper, more acutely the next time. They dream of returns not realizing that flesh can never live up to dreams, that a skeleton will never truly fill the gapping hole left by a body. People lose sight of real things quickly, you see.

But it was a long and quiet drive to Kent, and Mycroft had deigned accompanying John on this one, so John found himself with very little to do except to begin to see things clearly. At last.

 

And this is what it all came down to:

 

John Watson _had_ prayed, quietly and to himself, on lonely nights in his bed, in the beginning, for exactly this. He had never admitted that to anyone, not to his therapists or Mary or even to himself, during daylight hours, because he was _fine_. He’d _be_ fine and he’d move on and Sherlock wasn’t the first person he’d seen die and he was a doctor goddammit he knew that that’s what people did, they died, they left, and other people moved on somehow, in time. John was not soppy, he would not weep for himself and for Sherlock and the thing between them that had been lost in his dying because what would it fucking help? John visited Sherlock’s grave and pled aloud once, just that once, that was _it,_ and he would leave it at that because Sherlock wasn’t ever going to come back and he would not waste his life wishing for it. That would not befit a doctor’s pragmatism or a soldier’s resolve.

 

The truth was, John had nearly wasted his life once, had almost been sucked under, until someone had reminded him that he was a man of action, that he was worthy of some kind of life that was not lived out in the dark recesses of a bedsit on the wrong side of London. He was worth _more._ Sherlock had been that someone, and he had nearly died to bring John out of that. One pill, one shot, and a new life had erupted before him.

 

John had never thanked Sherlock for the life he had given him until it was too late, standing at parade rest before his grave.

 

_“I owe you so much.”_

 

Sherlock had been willing to die so that John could live. From the very start he had been so willing to die. And what was John doing with this wild and precious life Sherlock had given him? This life Sherlock had done everything he could to make sure it was John’s to keep?

 

John had not been a man worthy of his life in some time.

 

In three years.

 

And now he was speeding towards a future he didn’t deserve. 

 

Or a future that didn’t deserve him, he supposed, because Mary was beautiful and kind and could look at him in such a way that made him forget all the things he would never have been able to forget on his own. Mary could hold him and love him and it was almost exactly what he needed, except when it wasn’t, but he figured one day he’d find a way to forget that, too. He’d have time—he’d have his whole life to learn to forget. But maybe that had been John’s problem all along: he always thought he’d have more time.

 

‘More time’ had its costs, though. He’d seen that last night and he’d seen it this morning, in the bruises across Sherlock’s body, in the shadows under the detective’s eyes, in the dull thud of John’s own tired heart coming to a crescendo once more, one final swelling.

 

It hurt. All of it hurt—seeing Sherlock, realizing that he’d lied, realizing he’d come back, realizing he’d done it all for him. The pain radiated through him still, and he wondered if it always would, no matter how far away he got—miles, years away from that moment. The moment of realization that he _did matter_. Sherlock had hurt him because he mattered. And John had been hurt because Sherlock mattered.

 

Mattered more than anything.

 

John felt his throat closing up and the back of his eyes prickle painfully, thinking about the choice he’d made that morning. He tried to swallow it back, blink it back. He raised his hands to rub at his face, to clear away the state he was in and steel himself about the decision he’d made when he stepped out the door of 221B Baker Street and left Sherlock Holmes behind, alone— _Sherlock_ bloody _Holmes_ , who had never begged for anything in his life except for John to not leave him alone—when he felt the smooth glide of a gold band against his cheek.

 

He pulled his hands away and stared at the ring on his left hand.

 

“Jesus,” he murmured. He’d entirely forgotten about the whole thing until then. He’d been half-awake when he’d done it, kneeled in a living room that was no longer his and slipping a ring onto the finger of a man who was never his, and he hadn’t given it a thought. It was a thing that made no sense to do, yet he’d done it, and the implications were this:

 

John Watson was barreling down the M20 at 72mph on the way to his wedding. John Watson was already wearing his wedding ring. Sherlock Holmes was wearing the other.

 

If John was the sort of man to believe in signs, he’d have to admit there seemed to be a newly polished one glimmering in his face, telling him he should turn back. But John was not the sort of man to believe in signs and he was not the sort of man to turn back. To turn his back.

 

Except he had.

 

He had turned his back on Sherlock in every way a friend could, and the ache in his chest was only getting worse the further he got from him. He was shaking from it. He couldn’t breath. He lunged forward to tell the driver to turn back, that he’d left his best man behind—the best man he’d ever known—but as soon as he’d found the strength to do so, the car was rolling to a stop outside of a church in Kent.

 

Mary’s church. The one in which her parents had been married, the one in which she’d been baptized, the one in which she wanted to start this—their—new life.

 

And John couldn’t do it.

 

He couldn’t leave Mary behind, too, like he’d just done Sherlock. He just couldn’t. Because more than anything he wanted to be, starting right now, that sort of man: the sort of man who can’t leave those who really needed him, behind. He still wanted to believe that deep down he was a good man. And Mary, after all, was always meant to be his clean slate.

 

He felt sick, he really did. But he had also made his choice. Or it had been made for him—by a bored psychopath, by a magic trick, by three years and too many miles and an answered pray over an empty grave. John tore the ring from his finger and shoved it into his trouser pocket. Well, more tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones, he’d always heard.

 

When his father-in-law-to-be threw open the car door with a Jolly, “John!” he allowed himself to be dragged into the church without a fuss.

 

\---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ----------

 

John was just finishing the knot on his tie when there was a knock at the door of the small room he’d been allotted as the groom, in the basement of the quaint church.  He didn’t have much family to be hover over him and the wedding party was small enough—just two blokes he’d known practically his whole life—so the space was fine. Quiet except for the sound of guests arriving above their heads. John’s mates were sat on the wobbly wooden bench in the corner, polishing up their shoes in a sort of comfortable silence, when the knock came.

 

John’s head snapped towards the door, his eyes blown. But it was Harry who let herself in a moment later, and John’s shoulders sagged immediately.

 

“Bit tense, Johnny?” his best man asked, noticing John’s sudden, jerking movements.

 

“Hope you gents are decent,” Harry said when she entered, not looking as if she’d cared at all if they weren’t. Harry, too, had grown up alongside the two taciturn men in the corner. They gave her a friendly wave and stood up, at attention, assuming she was their cue.

 

“Not quite yet. I just hoped I could have a word with Johnny here real quick before I lose him forever.” The men nodded and excused themselves accordingly, kissing John’s sister on the cheek as they exited.

 

“Don’t you look dashing,” Harry said softly, stepping up in front of John, who’d turned towards her and away from the mirror. “Mum would have loved to see you like this, all grown up.” Her voice was dipping low, falling down her throat the way John knew it did when she was about to cry.

 

“You said the same thing at my graduation, I think. And before I went off to Afghanistan,” he stood a little taller in front of her and let her affectionately brush dust that wasn’t there from his shoulders. He gave her a smile that wasn’t tight—which had been his default throughout the afternoon—but tired. Appreciative but slightly uncertain.

 

They had not always got on, him and Harry. She was older and uncharacteristically rebellious for their family. She’d got the drinking bug from their father, who neither had ever really known, and it’d only gotten worse after their mother died—a car accident when John was still at university. John had always felt it should have brought them closer, them being all that was left of the Watson clan, but Harry had spun off and John had—selfishly, he sometimes felt—chosen to focus on building his own life instead of running after his older sister, patching up her’s.

 

They hadn’t spoken for months before Sherlock died, but she’d read about the whole thing in the papers eventually and had turned up outside 221B Baker Street for the first time a few days after. Her breath hadn’t smelled of alcohol. They were all each other had in the world then, and suddenly that meant something.

 

Slowly but surely, in the three years that followed, John and Harry had put their relationship back together. It turned out that Harry liked taking care of John. She liked being leaned on and trusted. John had grown up an unusually self-sufficient child and Harry had felt she’d missed out on something important by not being needed by her little brother.

 

They’d had their fits and starts since then, but Harry had been sober now for over two years and they had never been closer.

 

“Are you ready for this?” Harry asked, giving John a curious look. He paused, swallowed hard, and nodded. His eyes were prickling again and he knew Harry could see them going glassy.

 

“Mary really is lovely, John,” she said, as if he needed reminding. She straightened his tie a bit for want of something to do with her hands.

 

“I know.”

 

“Don’t muck it up,” she teased.

 

“I won’t.”

 

“Well then, sit tight. I think they’re still waiting on some people upstairs. I’ll send Nick to grab you when they’re ready.” Nick, his “best man.”

 

 “Harry, actually I—I need your help with something,” John finally stammered out, just as his sister was turning to go. She arched her eyebrow and stared him down.

 

“Yes?”

 

“I… oh god, I accidentally… lost… the ring.”

 

“The ring?”

 

“Mary’s ring.”

 

“Her wedding ring?”

 

“Yes. It’s gone. I… don’t know what happened. I… woke up this morning I couldn’t find it and I’ve been too nervous to think what to do.”

 

“Jesus, John.” Harry sounded exasperated and very much like her old self all of a sudden.

 

“Please, Harry.”

 

“Don’t worry, John. It’ll be fine. I’ll go… god, I don’t know, steal a gold ring off some lady upstairs. Just for the ceremony. You can explain what happened to Mary later.”

 

“Thank you,” John said, letting out a sigh of relief.

 

“Didn’t you just tell me you weren’t going to muck this up? You’re not even married yet and look at what you’ve done?” Harry’s voice had resumed its teasing tone, though, and she gave his shoulder a quick squeeze. “I’ll fix it, don’t worry.”

 

And then she was gone.

 

And John was alone, standing a tuxedo in a tiny room in Kent, waiting. Waiting.

 

Until there was another knock at the door and John knew—somehow he just _knew_ —it wasn’t Harry.

 

“Yeah?” he called, his voice oddly choked. Nonetheless John was standing up tall and straight when Sherlock walked through the door. All his training had at least taught him, the consummate soldier, to do that much.

 

“John,” the detective said calmly, slipping into the room. He’d apparently stumbled upon a more appropriate wardrobe after John left, as he stood just inside the room wearing sleek black trousers and an undeniably designer button-up shirt, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. The trousers were much too loose around his hips, though, John noted, and the shirt did not pull tight across his chest when Sherlock rolled his shoulders back proudly, as his shirts once had.

 

“I thought you weren’t coming.”

 

“No, I’m… not, really,” Sherlock said awkwardly, avoiding the older man’s gaze. “I just thought you might need this.” He sunk his hand into his trouser pocket and pulled out Mary’s wedding ring. John stared at the gold ring lying in Sherlock’s open palm, which he was holding aloft between them.

 

“That was… kind.” And it was, but kind was also wrong, or just not enough, for everything it was. John took the ring and pocketed it himself, where it clinked quietly beside his own, which had been safely ensconced there since he’d painfully torn it from his finger in the car.

 

“I saw Harry,” Sherlock began.

 

“What? Did she see you?” Panic seized John for a moment.

 

“No, of course not. Don’t be an idiot. She’s sober though.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Going on… two years?”

 

“Two years, four months, I think,” John said proudly. He didn’t tell Sherlock he was amazing for knowing.

 

“And you two are getting on now, yes? Quite well it seems.”

 

“We are.” It was taking everything John had to stay calm and composed. His answers were clipped, lest the cracks in his facade start showing.

 

“Mary… Harry… It seems my death has done quite well by you, hasn’t it? I would have removed myself from the picture much earlier had I know what a convenience it would be for you,” Sherlock said shortly. John couldn’t tell if Sherlock had said it to be cruel but John took it as such, and he was ruined. The floodgates opened.

 

“You bastard. You utter bastard,” John muttered, his teeth grinding down against each other. His eyes were blown wide and had taken on a mad sheen. Sherlock had the audacity to look surprised and it only took a second for John’s resolve to crumble. John inhaled sharply, shakily, and turned away.

 

“You don’t know. You have _no idea_ , Sherlock, what it was like after you died. What _I_ was like. I’ve seen men die before, good men. I thought I’d never sleep again. But somehow I always did, I learned to step away from that gnawing pain one way or another. I found something I could fix, I could save. That helped. Helped too much, maybe. I learned to compartmentalize the terrible things that had happened to me so well that when you died… Jesus, when you died I couldn’t _feel_ it. I couldn’t feel _anything_.”

 

John had retreated to the far corner of the small room, one hand resting on his hip while the other scrubbed at his face, which had gone slack in surrender. He kept his back to Sherlock; he couldn’t stand not to. John was too much a man to face forward and speak with such despondency withering his features.

 

For his part, Sherlock stood back and watched John like a car crash, all hunched shoulders and a bowing back. The doctor was starting to shake—he would break apart at any moment, Sherlock knew—but the detective allowed John his dignity and did not approach him, even though it was the only thing in the world he wanted to do in that moment. His hands were clenching and unclenching at his sides, longing to grasp some part of John and hold him still until this all passed, this flood.

 

Still, Sherlock stayed back. A still point in the turning world that was John Watson unraveling in front of him.

 

“All I wanted to do was feel that sadness, the proper kind of sadness one should feel when their best friend dies. I wanted to be debilitated. I wanted to feel something that would remind me that you had been this real man who had lived and been brilliant, that I hadn’t imagined you. I wanted to scream but it felt wrong and I couldn’t.” He had wanted to feel the grief of a man and all he’d had was the understanding of a doctor, the pragmatism of the soldier. John took a few shallow breaths and continued. Sherlock wasn’t sure how much longer he’d be able to listen to John’s confession.

 

“I sat in the flat for—God, I don’t even know how long—and just stared at your bloody empty chair and it was worse, somehow, than Afghanistan. Maybe if I’d woken up crying in the middle of the night, hearing your body crunching against the pavement, seeing your lifeless eyes staring up at nothing… Jesus, somehow that would have been better. Nightmares would have been better because they would have _hurt_ and that’s all I wanted: to hurt. The world just kept turning and I didn’t understand how that was possible—I didn’t have some searing ache in my leg or a scar on my shoulder to remind me what had happened. I felt like I should have been marked somehow, by your absence. There should have been some gaping hole somewhere on me, to show I’d lost you. But I was the same man, the same unimportant man. Now I was just… alone. So alone. But I didn’t know how to _feel_ _it_ anymore.”

 

John had finished.  He was done. Both of his hands went to his hips and he let his head hang low, exhausted. Drained. Empty. 

 

“I—I really don’t know what you want me to say, John. I’m sorry—“ Sherlock tried, the words tumbling from his mouth awkwardly, his chest constricting and his mind going fuzzy. He’d wanted this to be easier. He’d only come to Kent because he needed to return something of John’s and then he was going to leave—to where, he wasn’t sure yet. All he knew was that he was going to disappear properly this time because John deserved that and John was the only person Sherlock could be unselfish for.

 

“Tell me again why you did it,” John said, a hint of calmness returning to his voice.

 

“Did what?”

 

“Jumped. Why did you jump? Why did you make me watch?”

 

“I told you, John. Moriarty would have had you killed. I… I made you watch because… you needed to believe I was dead. Moriarty’s men needed to believe you believed I was dead. You think I don’t know it was cruel but I do. It was cruel. But it was also necessary. If you hadn’t seen the whole thing for yourself you never would have believed it.”

 

“I would have traveled the world looking for you. I—”

 

“I know you would have, John. I didn’t want you to. That’s no way to live. I should know. You deserved better. If I was smarter—God, Moriarty was smart, John; he was—and maybe if I had just been a little smarter than him I could have thought of something else…”

 

John’s head slowly rose up at this. He’d never heard Sherlock suggest he wasn’t the cleverest man around and something about the admission struck him like a physical blow to the chest. It was all Sherlock had, his mind—it’s what he prized above all else. He expected he’d never again hear the detective admit it had failed him.

 

“I did not wish to cause you pain,” Sherlock continued. “But I am ultimately a selfish man, John, and it would have hurt me more to lose you. To live in a world that did not have you in it. So I did what I had to do to ensure that didn’t happen.” Sherlock voice was very even and his words measured. John turned around completely while the younger man was speaking, his jaw a little slack. Sherlock was speaking to the ground between them.

 

“And then I lost you anyway, just differently,” the detective finished. He raised his eyes slowly to meet John’s, which were blue and glassy and staring at Sherlock with such scrutiny he didn’t think he could stand it. He began to squirm, tugging at his trousers, unrolling his shirtsleeves. Anything to keep himself from meeting John’s gaze again, certain as he was that he would drown in the sadness he saw there.

 

“You forgot about me,” Sherlock said when John found himself at a loss for words.

 

“No.”

 

“You began to. I hadn’t accounted for that, that you’d stop thinking about me, stop missing me.”

 

“I never meant to. I didn’t want to, but… they’re right, what they say about time.”

 

“What about it?”

 

“It heals all wounds. Whether you want it to or not. Sherlock, I—“ _Say it, John Watson. Sherlock Holmes breaks things and you fix them. That’s how this works. So_ say it.

 

“John…”

 

“Why did it matter so much to you, the thought of losing me?” John asked quietly, stepping closer to Sherlock.

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“Why did I matter to you at all, Sherlock?”

 

“John, you…” Sherlock was stumbling, his eyes furrowed together in desperate uncertainty.

 

“Tell me.”

 

“You must know.”

 

“Say it.” John was standing so close now the toes of their shoes were nearly touching. John had to look up at the older man.

 

“No.” Sherlock had made his choice, too. He took a step back. He looked away.

 

“I can’t do this,” John blurted out loudly which drew Sherlock’s eyes back to his reluctantly. The doctor’s eyes began to water. “I can’t do this, Sherlock. I can’t go out there and marry _her_. I can’t. Oh god, why can’t I?” John had started untying his tie with frantic, shaking hands.

 

“John, please…”

 

“You left me!” he shouted. “You fucking bloody left me and Mary is good and kind and she wouldn't. She would never leave like you did, you fucking bastard. She wouldn’t _do_ something like that."

 

“John, please, stop that,” Sherlock said sternly.

 

“She wouldn’t _hurt me_.”

 

“And that’s exactly why you should marry her.”

                                        

“What?” John froze, his eyes wide.

 

“If you’re certain she won’t hurt you, then marry her. You deserve to be with someone like that. Stop it and put your tie back on.”

 

“No, no, you’re not supposed to say _that_ ,” John cried.

 

“She’s nice, you said. She’ll be good for you.” Sherlock’s voice shook just a hair. John heard it and was enraged.

 

“But you're supposed to be a selfish bastard,” John accused. “You're supposed to not care about her and tell me to run off with you.”

 

“And why would I do something like that?”

 

“Because I LOVE YOU and you know it because you know everything about everyone!”

 

The declaration hung in the air between them, suspended by John’s heavy breathing and Sherlock’s thumping heart. For too long neither man spoke, because John was right: Sherlock did know. The great detective had known for a total of seven minutes that the man standing in front of him—the doctor with clammy palms and red-rimmed eyes, the soldier with hunched shoulders and no fight left in him—was utterly in love with him, despite logic or reason or his better judgment. Sherlock knew, but there was nothing for it. Not in this lifetime. He straightened up a little taller and cleared his throat.

 

"Well, I’m not going to. I only came here to give you back that ring. I guess you were right, John: we don't really know each other at all, not anymore.”

 

John couldn’t move. He could hardly breathe. And oh, he hated himself for it in that moment. He should have lunged at Sherlock, grabbed him by his bloody pressed collar, and pulled the detective flush against him. He should have never let him go.

 

But he did.

 

Sherlock gave him a terse nod, turned, and disappeared. The door slammed heavily behind him. 

 

John collapsed to his knees and swore he could feel wet pavement beneath them, could feel the blood soaking in through the fabric. “Oh god, no.” He wouldn’t survive going through that all again.

 

\---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ----------

 

Sherlock wanted to believe he was doing something more dignified than fleeing, but that was exactly what he was doing, fleeing down the stone corridor of the church basement and up the stairs that led to a hallway of staff offices and toilets. The noise of the wedding guests still filtering into the sanctuary seemed faint and far off, and Sherlock figured he could avoid the whole mess of them by slipping out the same back door he’d used earlier.

 

But the hallways twisted in ways he didn’t recall and he felt uncomfortably lightheaded, and before he knew it he had rounded a corner and come face to face with Mary Morstan.

 

“Oh!” she yelped in surprise. She had just stepped out of a room to the left and her white tulle and satin dress was billowing around her like a vision.

 

Sherlock couldn’t help his eyes running over her, taking her in from head to foot. A crystal-encrusted headband that came from a much beloved and dearly departed aunt, the one who’d taken care of her when her mother was sick; chandelier earrings of tanzanite and opal which were new and bordering on extremely pricey, a gift from the father who’d failed his daughter by letting the heating bill go unpaid one too many times when she was just a girl; an expensive gown she paid for herself despite being a primary school teacher—she was in her mid-thirties and had been saving for her wedding since she left university. Sherlock saw it all.

 

And more.

 

Bags under her eyes that her foundation didn’t quite cover. A yellowing-hue to her skin everywhere except her face, suggesting she hadn’t had time to buy new make-up that matched better or made the discoloration less noticeable. Dark brunette hair with no split ends that was thinning at the roots.

 

“You’re Sherlock Holmes, aren’t you?” she asked, snapping him prematurely out of his deductions. He nodded. “Oh god, you’re meant to be dead. Does… does John know?” He nodded again.

 

Mary turned back into the room where Sherlock could hear a handful of women complaining about the stylists that had done their hair that morning and asked, “Do you guys think I could have a minute?” They all eyed Sherlock suspiciously as they vacated the room—all except the youngest bridesmaid, who gave him a flirtatious wink instead. Mary gestured him inside.

 

“John used to talk about you, when we first met. Talked about the things you two did together, solving crimes and all of that. He talked about it flippantly though, the way people do when something’s important and they don’t want to face just how important.” Mary took a seat at the window but Sherlock remained by the door, hovering.

 

“I’m not stupid,” she said.

 

“No, apparently not,” he answered.

 

“You were important. To him.”

 

“’Were’ being the operative word.”

 

Mary looked at him for a long moment and sighed, turning towards the window. Her fingers were shaking almost imperceptibly and Sherlock saw it all before she said anything. Pancreatic cancer, stage four. It had metastasized to her liver, giving her three months on the outside. She just found out two weeks ago and she hadn’t told John.

 

“I suppose you’ve read it on me already, haven’t you?” she asked, looking back at him with one eye raised. “He said you do that, that you could look at someone and tell their whole life story. What gave it away? Slight puffiness under the eyes? Puncture marks on the back of my hands?”

 

“Your skin is slightly jaundiced, your nails are cracked and stained with iodine, there’s—” he began quietly.

 

“That’s enough. You really are just like he said you were. Quite amazing. I never believed him before. He told me you died.”

 

“He thought I had.”

 

“Jumped from a building when he was standing right there in front of it?”

 

“It’s a _very_ long story, Ms. Morstan. Much too long for a bride on her wedding day.”

 

“He never talked about what it was like, watching his best friend die. Why would he? That stuff hurts. It was easier for him to ignore it, start a different life. I only got the whole story from Harriet, just last Christmas.”

 

“And what’s the whole story?”

 

“That he loved you. She didn’t know if he had ever told you—they never talked about it. But Harry knew. She thought I was good for him, though, because he needed to love someone who could love him back. And I do. I love him.”

 

Sherlock wanted very badly to keep his composure in front of Mary but the truth was he was wrecked—exhausted and a little out of his mind—and before she was done speaking he had collapsed to the floor, his knees bent up in front of him and his back pressing hard against the door. His limbs had started trembling at some point.

 

He’d come barreling out of John’s room so quickly and run straight into Mary and he hardly had time to _think_. And that’s what he needed to do, he needed to think, because everyone kept telling him things he refused to believe. A declaration of love? He’d spent his life convinced—despite his low estimation of the populous’ intelligence—that no one would ever be stupid enough to love him. But John Watson was not a stupid man… just a broken one, grief-struck and sentimental.

 

John hadn’t been thinking rationally when he said it. But he had still said them, those ridiculous little three words that always cause such trouble—whether they’re not being said or said at the wrong time or to the wrong person, too late or too early, not loudly enough, or just to someone who won’t hear them.

 

Sherlock wished he hadn’t heard them. He somehow felt that would have made his fleeing from John less terrible, even if that wasn’t the truth. Sherlock hadn’t needed to hear them to know they were true.

 

“I’m sick,” Mary said, bringing Sherlock out of himself a bit.

 

“Obviously,” he muttered.

 

“John doesn’t know.”

 

“No.”

 

“I love him. I don’t know if you believe me, Sherlock, or if that matters to you at all, but I do. I don’t want to hurt him. Perhaps it was selfish of me to go through with all this wedding nonsense when I’ll be… in a few months—Jesus.” Mary broke off and took a few shallow breaths.  “He doesn’t need to go through that again, watching someone die. He doesn’t deserve it. He deserves better. He deserves the best.” She gave Sherlock an odd look, a bit watery but full of determination. He closed his eyes to it.

 

“I’m not the best.”

 

“John said you weren’t modest.”

 

“I’m really not. I’m not the best for him. I wish I was, I—I do. But I’m not good for him.”

 

“But I think you are. And you know it. I just think you’re scared… of being a good man, perhaps, but also not being good enough. We always care too much about what those we love think of us. But Sherlock, he used to tell me you were the best man he ever knew.”

 

“John is too good a man. He wouldn’t let you—“

 

“I’m not going to leave him a choice, Sherlock. The only thing I can give him is this… this chance. That’s what you do for those you love. You make sacrifices.”

 

“I’m sorry,” Sherlock said. He looked her straight in the eye when he said it, and she looked back at him softly, a dying bride sitting prettily at the end of all things. Too kind for the things that were happening to her, but wasn’t that always the way? She took off her earrings first, one and then the other, followed by her bejeweled headband and with it her veil.

 

“No you’re not. Not for this, anyway. But that’s fine. I’m not the one who needs your apologies.”

 

\---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ----------

 

Harry found her younger brother curled in on himself on the floor of church’s basement room, fitfully asleep. His face looked drawn and pale. She didn’t know where his tie had gone but his suit jacket was spread across the floor like he’d been using it to wipe something up. Harry prodded him gently in his good shoulder and John blinked awake quickly, rousing from his light sleep with bloodshot eyes and a raw throat.

 

“Oh, Johnny,” she murmured, sinking to her knees to wrap her arms around him. He shivered.

 

“Of course Mary came and told you first,” she said softly. He stared at her blankly, his brows furrowing. “Did she say why?”

 

“She didn’t say… uh… she didn’t say anything,” John answered. The confusion in his voice could too easily be mistaken for disbelief or shock, and Harry merely hugged him tighter.

 

“She always seemed like such a nice girl, I don’t know what got into her. I never would have pegged her for one to get cold feet, I really wouldn’t have.”

 

“The wedding’s been called off?”

 

“I know, Johnny. I’m so sorry. God, look at you. You look in a right state. Let’s get you out of this place—it’s obviously doing a number on you. Let’s get you back to London.” Harry helped pull John to his feet and gave him a final sad look while he steadied himself.

 

John didn’t understand exactly what had happened but the pieces were all there for him to make his deductions, dazedly, drained and oddly uninterested. He was starting to get used to this liberating feeling of numbness, the freedom of indifference. Though his eyes still stung and he knew he would not soon forget the easy disregard in Sherlock’s eyes when John opened up his very raw and tender heart to him and he’d stalked off at the sight of it—he’d been doing it since that very first night, years and years ago, why was he still so surprised at Sherlock’s capacity for disappearing?—John was ready to wash his hands of the whole mess.

 

He should have cared more that he’d been abandoned, first by Sherlock and then apparently by his fiancée, left alone to gasp and weep and shake alone in a church basement, but it seemed far away now. Nothing could touch him, not anymore.

 

John let himself be bundled into a car by Harry—a car decidedly less sleek than the one he’d arrived in, which seemed appropriate; he felt very much like some kind of teddy bear, occasionally loved but shabby and worn from being so carelessly tossed about. One could trace the dried saline trails down his cheeks if one so pleased and his shirt was wrinkled and dusty from his stint on the old basement floor. But he’d be _fine_ because he was always _fine_. He thought he could feel his innards slowly turning into well-oiled cogs and gears.

 

“I’ll get everything sorted here,” Harry assured him, “and see you back in London later tonight.” And then the door was closed and he was barreling back towards his nondescript flat in Highgate. Alone.

 

 

Dusk was just settling in over London when the car finally came to a stop and he tumbled out. The sky was a tender pink—the color of newborn babies and fresh scars. Relief after pain, the calm after the storm. It could have been hateful but John found it soothed him. He was not so far gone to see that this, too, would pass; he would forget this mess in time like he had forgotten so much else. A scar would grow over the memory and perhaps it would ache on rainy days, but it would not destroy him. John Watson had weathered too many storms to be washed to sea by a measly broken heart.

 

Dragging his feet, John climbed the steps to his third-floor flat with the quiet resolve of a soldier returning home. But as he leaned against his front door and fumbled in his pocket for his keys, brushing against two gold rings and some spare change, the door gave way, already unlocked. John stepped inside cautiously, his spine straight and his shoulders squared.

 

What he found inside was two steaming cups of tea, a plate of biscuits, and a timeworn detective sitting at his breakfast table. The younger man—though it did seem odd to think of him as young now; there were new lines around his eyes and a handful of grey hairs at his shorn temples, John noticed—was slouched in his chair, his arms wrapped around his torso instinctively while his head bobbed with the effort of staying awake. He snapped up when John’s shoes squeaked against the cheap linoleum.  

 

“John,” he said firmly, standing up. “I made tea.”

 

“Did you?” He stayed at the edge of the room, eyeing the detective warily.

 

“And biscuits. Well, I didn’t _make_ the biscuits but—they’re the chocolate ones you like.” John knew there hadn’t been any biscuits in the flat. Mary had been on a kick before the wedding and had insisted on throwing everything out that contained any gluten or processed sugar. It had made for a few miserable weeks, by John’s standards. But there were definitely biscuits sitting on his table and it was a small, stupid thing, but he suddenly felt discomposed.

 

“Those aren’t from my cupboard…” he said slowly.

 

“No, I had to go down the shops to grab them. I thought, well, it’s been a day, hasn’t it? I thought you’d like a cuppa and a couple biscuits.”

 

John stared at Sherlock for a long moment.

 

“Milk, two sugars,” Sherlock confirmed.

 

“Three years and you still know how I take my tea?”

 

“Always.”

 

“Sherlock,” John started, wearily.

 

“No, John. Please. I’ve made a mess of things, obviously. I know that. I—“ Sherlock let out a choked noise and scrunched up his face in agitation. His mouth was moving silently, as though he was trying out his words on himself first.

 

“You must believe that every step of the way, I thought I was doing what was best for you.”

 

“You’re not my mother, Sherlock. You don’t get to decide what’s best for me.”

 

“No, perhaps not. But—I thought—I thought that’s what friends did. Protect people.”

 

“Well, yes, Sherlock. But—“ John wasn’t angry. Just tired.

 

“What I did, it was to protect you. All of it. Lying to you, jumping, running away. Especially the running away.”

 

“Today?”

 

Sherlock nodded and held John’s eyes, despite how painful it was to see hope, betrayal, and resignation swirling in their darkened depths.

 

“Then you got it wrong,” John finally said.

 

“Yes, a bit. Apparently,” Sherlock admitted. John gave him a stern look.

 

“A lot. Completely,” the detective qualified.

 

“What is it that you want, Sherlock? You’re giving me whiplash, honestly, and I can’t stand it anymore. Just tell me what you want—”

 

“You,” Sherlock said immediately, surprisingly them both with the urgency of his answer.

 

“You’d leave again if you had to, wouldn’t you?” John asked. “You do it all again if you thought it’d keep me safe. Disappear, just like that.”

 

“Yes, if I had to,” he said firmly, without shame. “You are the… the _most_ important… the _only_ … God, don’t you see, John? You are all there is for me. If I lost you there would never be anyone else. I would do _anything_ to keep you safe. I would hurt you if I had to, to protect you. And I won’t apologize for that. And do you know how I could do that? How I was able to jump off a fucking roof and make you watch, even though I knew it was the worst thing I’d ever done? Because I knew you would survive. It’s what you do. You’re a survivor. It’s why I love you.”

 

“You love me?”

 

“Isn’t it obvious?”

 

“It’s not to me.”

 

“As ever you see but do not observe. Yes, John. I love you.”

 

Sherlock stepped around the table and approached John slowly, giving him time to flee if he was so inclined. John, for his part, stood stock-still, his eyes blown wide, his breathing labored. His heart was pounding out an erratic rhythm as if in Morse code it was instructing him to _run, you fool_. But he couldn’t. The past twelve hours had been nothing but them—John and Sherlock, Sherlock and John, wasn’t it always the way?—running towards each other and away again, nearly touching, nearly saying just the right thing at just the right time, but somehow missing the mark, time and time again. But here they both still were, for better or worse, and John was ready to stand his ground at last.

 

“And what if I don’t accept that?” John found it in himself to say.

 

“What, that I love you?”

 

“No, that you’re willing to lie to me if you think it’s for my ‘own good’? What if I don’t accept that you’d be willing to hurt me if you had to. What if I said, no? You might be Sherlock bloody Holmes and you might think yourself the smartest man in the room 99% of the time but no. You don’t get to make decisions like that without my consent. That is not love, that’s possession.”

 

“Do you trust me?”

 

“This isn’t happening…”

 

“John, do you trust me?”

 

“Why should I? I have no reason to.”

 

“I know that, but do you?”

 

And despite himself—because Sherlock had always be the exception to every instinct, every gut feeling, every logical move—he said, “Yes.”

 

With that, Sherlock closed the distance between them at last and pressed his lips carefully to John’s. The doctor placed one hand on the other man’s chest but he did not push him away. His other hand came to rest on Sherlock’s bicep—a withered thing hanging limply by the detective’s side. Sherlock’s hands rested timidly on John’s hips.

 

They stayed like that for a long moment, slowly rearranging their lips and pressing them harder and softer against each other’s. It was clumsy and chaste, but important. It was both a tearing down of their one final barrier and the stitching together of all their loose ends. It was Sherlock and John becoming, once again, Sherlock and John, two empty shells filling each other up. Sherlock’s steady heart pressed against John’s until the doctor’s unusual heartbeat steadied itself, and then they broke apart.

 

 “You need to promise me, Sherlock,” John said shallowly, leaning forward to rest his forehead against Sherlock’s sternum.

 

“Promise you what, John?” Sherlock raised his hands to card them through John’s coarse, greying locks.

 

“Don’t disappear again.”

 

“John, I—“

 

“Hurt me, if you have to. Do something so terrible that you think I’ll never forgive you if you must, but don’t leave. Don’t _disappear_ like that, as if you’d never existed at all. I need to live in a world that has you in it,” John echoed.

 

And what, if not this, is love?

 


End file.
